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oracle 🔮 — Answer Oracle Skill Design

Date: 2026-06-01 Status: to be implemented

In one line

A fortune-cookie-style Claude Skill: /oracle draws a random playful, encouraging line as your "answer of the day", auto-detects Chinese/English, and is independent of whatever you ask.

oracle = an oracle 🔮, and also a pun on the Oracle database.

Goals

  • A lightweight, fun, grab-and-go "make a wish / get an answer" toy.
  • Fortune-cookie style: answers are a pre-written pool; draw one at random.
  • One bilingual command: a single /oracle with separate Chinese and English answer banks, picking the bank automatically at runtime.
  • Truly random: run one line of shell to draw, rather than letting Claude pick (avoids bias and repeats).

Non-goals

  • No brand ties, no food / commercial elements. "oracle" means only "an oracle" — it does not trade on the Oracle database trademark.
  • No reading the question to answer it: the question is just ritual. Language detection only chooses which bank, never which line.
  • No MCP / server / network / persistent stats. Pure Skill.

Form

A single skill, shipped as a Claude Code plugin so the repo doubles as its own marketplace — users install with /plugin marketplace add d-bytebase/oracle + /plugin install oracle@oracle, no file copying:

oracle/                          (repo = marketplace + plugin)
  .claude-plugin/
    plugin.json
    marketplace.json
  skills/oracle/
    SKILL.md
    answers-zh.txt   (Chinese, 500 lines)
    answers-en.txt   (English, 500 lines)

SKILL.md locates its answer banks via ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/skills/oracle/, with fallbacks for a manual ~/.claude/skills/oracle/ copy or running from the repo.

Command

  • The skill draws via /oracle in spirit; as a plugin it is namespaced /oracle:oracle (plugin:skill). Claude can also trigger it from the description.
  • Optional alias /答案: depends on whether Claude Code supports non-ASCII slash commands — add it if so, otherwise skip.

Language detection

At runtime /oracle picks a bank by a priority ladder, stopping at the first match:

  1. Forced switch: argument is exactly zh / en → use that language.
  2. Question language: a question argument is present → detect the question's language (contains Chinese characters → Chinese bank, otherwise English bank).
  3. Conversation language: bare /oracle → follow the current conversation's language. (Runtime judgment, not unit-tested.)
  4. System fallback: still ambiguous → check $LANG: case "$LANG" in zh*) Chinese ;; *) English ;; esac

Language detection only selects the bank; once selected, draw one line at random with shuf as usual.

Draw mechanism

SKILL.md instructs Claude to run one line of shell to draw, rather than picking itself:

  • Preferred: shuf -n 1 answers-<lang>.txt
  • Fallback (no shuf — common on macOS): awk -v seed="$RANDOM" 'BEGIN{srand(seed)} NF{a[++n]=$0} END{print a[int(rand()*n)+1]}' answers-<lang>.txt. Seed with $RANDOM, not the clock — bare srand() seeds from time-in-seconds, so rapid draws in the same second repeat. The NF guard skips blank lines so a trailing newline can't draw an empty answer.

Content

  • Tone: playful + encouraging, gentle and healing, with a touch of mystical open-endedness. ✨ as an accent.
  • Count: 500 unique lines each for Chinese and English (dedup the pool so repeated draws don't repeat).
  • Length: short enough to read at a glance — Chinese ≤ 24 characters / English ≤ 60 characters.
  • Organized by series (variety guaranteed when writing; the full pool is random when drawing): courage, comfort, childlike wonder, timing, play. The English bank mirrors the same series but is original, not a translation.

Examples:

  • 「今天不用长大,你已经很勇敢了。」
  • 「再等等,好东西正在路上,它只是迷路了一下下。」
  • "Yes. Go do the brave little thing."
  • "The answer is closer than you think. Turn around."

Output

A 🔮 opener in the chosen language, then the answer on its own line as a blockquote. No fixed-width box — that avoids display-width math over CJK / emoji (easy to get wrong) and lets answers wrap naturally. An optional question argument is echoed for ritual only and does not affect the draw:

🔮 You give the crystal ball a shake…

> It's okay not to grow up today — you're already brave.

🔮 你摇了摇水晶球…

> 今天不用长大,你已经很勇敢了。

Success criteria

  • /oracle in any directory draws one answer with a 🔮 opener.
  • All four language-detection rungs work; repeated draws are visibly non-repetitive.
  • Each bank has 500 unique lines, no brand / food words, consistent tone.
  • /oracle <question> echoes the question but the answer is unrelated to it.

Testing

  • Run the draw N times; confirm no errors, no repeat bias, clean rendering (opener + blockquote).
  • Verify all four language rungs: Chinese question / English question / zh|en forced / bare command falling back under LANG=zh_CN and en_US.
  • Verify the fallback branch in an environment without shuf.
  • Spot-read ~30 lines (half Chinese, half English); confirm no brand / food words, no off-topic lines, glanceable length.